


Lease for Lives

by thisbluespirit



Category: Sapphire and Steel
Genre: Alternate Timelines, Community: genprompt_bingo, Community: hc_bingo, Gen, Pre-Canon, Temporary Character Death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-16
Updated: 2019-04-16
Packaged: 2020-01-15 03:54:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,221
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18490798
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thisbluespirit/pseuds/thisbluespirit
Summary: Circumstances drive Copper to do more than just bend a rule...





	Lease for Lives

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the 100 Elements prompt: “Copper / Silver - doppelganger & presumed dead"; for the Genprompt Bingo square "Hey, you're... me: meeting alternate universe counterparts" and the Hurt/Comfort Bingo square "sacrifice".

“Having trouble?”

Copper didn’t bother to answer or raise his head from the newspaper he was studying, spread out on the mahogany desk in front of him. 

“Well, somebody thinks you can’t manage without me,” Silver said, tugging the paper effortlessly out of the other technician’s hold. He stared at it for a moment before dropping it back onto the desk and, having succeeded in getting Copper’s attention, he walked across the room to examine the clock on the mantelpiece. He pulled out his pocket watch first to check against it, showing off a navy blue waistcoat speckled with silver diamond shapes under his expensively-tailored coat. Copper suspected that was for his benefit, too. Silver flickered a glance back at Copper. “Or perhaps they feel you’re too slow. As usual.”

The house clock had stopped at twenty-five minutes past six, although the time was now one thirty in the afternoon.

“Hmm,” Silver said, tapping it lightly. “Still wound.”

Copper gave a nod, and pushed the newspaper towards Silver. “Yesterday’s _Barnicott Monitor_. The seventh of November 1831. It’s been read once. It’s the only thing out of place in the room.”

Silver raised his eyebrows, glancing around the room before crossing to the dresser on the side, investigating Copper’s statement for himself. Copper waited. Silver would come to the same conclusion. The place was inhumanly neat, as if it had been tidied in preparation for a journey away, or perhaps only for the night if the servants were efficient or the occupant particularly fastidious. Even Copper didn’t need telling that it wasn’t usual human behaviour. 

“I see what you mean,” said Silver, turning back to Copper. He ran a finger down the columns of print on the paper between them. “And only this left to show signs of life. You think the newspaper caused the break?”

Copper drew back. “I don’t think anything as yet. See what you make of it.”

“You don’t think? How typical,” murmured Silver, but he leant over the desk and read through the columns that Copper had been studying: small, inexplicable parts of human lives cryptically coded, items and services on offer, staff wanted: write to an unknown AB or Miss M or Mr GL at the address given. Copper had seen only one item he considered an oddity, and he was curious to see if Silver would agree.

Silver pulled a face at one article, smiled at another, and then, his expression sobering, he stopped, tapping his finger onto the paper. “Ah, now this one is a little unusual: _Wanted: one house or cottage situate in Barnicott Village._ ” He skipped over the description of the number of rooms and other amenities, concentrating on the last line. “ _Must be vacated by the previous occupants?_ ”

“And so it has been,” said Copper. “Vacated. The house is full of clothes, crockery, kitchen implements, and all the usual sorts of furnishings, even if they are all precisely in their places, but I’ve seen no sign of any inhabitants.”

Silver was still frowning. “But in itself – is it enough, do you think? And why send us, if so?”

“It could merely be a coincidence, of course,” said Copper. “The newspaper was at the desk, the chair in position – the occupant happened to vanish while reading it.”

Silver cast him a look. “A coincidence?”

“I agree, I doubt it,” Copper said. “Whatever happened started in this room. I’ve been working my way through the house methodically –”

“Naturally.”

“And came back to this room. The clock in here stopped several seconds ahead of any of the others in the house. This newspaper lies on the desk, the only article in the building not tidied away into a drawer or chest, and there is this advertisement. And then there are the echoes – I’ve seen and heard them everywhere else, but not in here.”

“Echoes?”

Copper nodded to the door. “Go out into the hallway, Silver.”

Silver vanished and then, a few seconds later, reappeared. “I see what you mean. It seems to be the same group of people – in some other reality, or time.”

“Us, too,” said Copper. “I saw myself entering this room, and you out in the hallway before. I think it must be the result of the break – a fracture in time.”

Silver raised an eyebrow. “That’s imprecise from you.”

Copper stared at the newspaper. The effects were consistent with a fracture in time, or echoes, past or future, caught in the frame of the building, but something else didn’t quite fit when he examined the evidence in his mind. “What did you make of it?”

“Obviously the result of this fracture,” said Silver, brushing down his coat. “What else could it be?” 

Copper shook himself, refusing to be drawn into an argument, and set to work on the topmost drawer next to him. It was locked, so he ran his fingers around the edges of the drawer, getting its measure, while Silver leaned over and pressed one finger to the lock, causing it to spring open, hitting his hand.

“Silver,” said Copper, but then let any irritation slide away at what he could sense coming from within. He put out a hand, causing Silver to back away while he drew out a bundle of papers tied together with an old ribbon.

He untied the ribbon – slowly, with care – and as he did so the freed papers danced out of his reach, caught in a sudden gust of wind from nowhere that scattered them across the room. Save one, which remained lying on the desk next to the newspaper. Out in the hallway, he heard another echo, the faraway sound of someone weeping.

Silver picked up the paper. “It’s a lease,” he said, and perched on the desk to read it, his other hand resting on the sheets of newspaper. “The trigger, I think, or part of it. I can –”

 _Silver!_ Copper stretched out his hand to pull him out of danger, but he was not fast enough – Silver had always told him he was too slow. A small, framed picture fell from the wall, its glass shattering on the floorboards as Silver faded away, beginning with the hand holding the lease and spreading rapidly till there was nothing left. The document floated back down to the desk and lay there, the room and it utterly still again.

“Silver,” said Copper, sharply. He strode out into the hallway and back into the room again. “No tricks now, please.” _Silver?_

There was no answer, but Copper could not quite believe the inevitable conclusion. He rewound the scene in his mind and replayed it, but with the same result. Silver had gone, too swiftly even to cry out. Nothing remained. _Impossible._ There had always been Silver. There would always be Silver.

Copper remained where he was, his mouth setting in a grim line, and rearranged the room around him, the papers back on the desk, and the newspaper, the lease, and the picture together. He sat back down on the chair, pulled on his gloves, and proceeded to study the sketch and the document.

The sketch was of a house, but not this one. It was the same setting – Copper recognised the distinctive shape of the hills behind it from his explorations outside earlier – but the house in the drawing predated this one, probably by a hundred years. The house he was sitting in had been built in 1773, although Copper had noted that some of the bricks used had come from an older building.

He weighted the document open with a lump of tin he’d found in his pocket. He hadn’t put it there. Typical Silver, he thought with his usual irritation, fast superseded by the awareness of loss. There were jagged edges in his mind where some vital connecting part had been torn away. He forced himself to focus on the document in front of him. It laid out the terms for the lease for three lives of a property – this farmhouse, or the one that had been here before it – by Sir John Barton to a Richard Bower, yeoman, the tenant. Copper glanced at the date: 1762. Three lives was ninety-nine years. The lease was still in effect. Had it been broken in some way – the building of the new house?

“Speculation,” he said, more severe on himself than he would have been with – somebody else. He stood and crossed to the door, hearing the echo of voices again.

There were ghostly figures moving about, between the walls, not quite following the layout of the new house. They were in the old one. It wasn’t a fracture in time, Copper recognised. Time had shifted, different timelines competing with this one – one where the new house had never been built, one where it had never been let, where there was moss on fallen down stones, and several others where he had only just arrived, or Silver had not yet vanished, or he had vanished. The effect was getting worse; that was why it was more noticeable now.

Copper frowned. He was in this room, at the centre, and everything he did or did not do must be adding to it: every action begetting a new timeline. Was he even the original Copper in the original room, or was it one of the other Coppers who had begun it all? For each of them, time would have seemed only to have gone in a singular line from where they started. 

A broken lease, an advertisement that had perhaps been a printer’s error or a malicious joke, and a picture, a memento of what had been lost. He did not need Jet or Sapphire or Emerald to know that something _had_ been lost. Someone unseen was weeping in the empty rooms above. In the original timeline, perhaps? 

It had to stop, immediately, and anything he might do might worsen it. And even if They sent others to help, they might merely enter into their own alternate timeline, not his – a version where they sent Steel, or Tin, or Lead. They wouldn’t do that. This was up to him.

It really was a terrible shame Silver wasn’t here, he reflected, a brief glint of humour in his mind, because there was only one thing for it: he must break the rules.

 

Copper stepped out into the hallway, surrounded again by ghosts that were not ghosts, and then opened the door to the room, slicing heedlessly through a barrier he should not have tried to cross, and inserting himself into the closest of the other timelines.

He emerged into the same room, identical in every way here as there – save for an alternate Copper and Silver who now turned to stare at him.

“It’s me,” he said, before they could assume he was a phantom of time and try to get rid of him. “There are a growing number of alternate and concurrent timelines existing in the building. I’m from one of the others.”

The Other Copper stared at him, disapproval in his grey gaze. “You shouldn’t have come here, then, should you?”

“No,” said the Other Silver. “I don’t need _two_ of you around. One is more than enough, thank you.” Then he gave Copper a grin. “Or perhaps this one is more interesting?”

Copper was careful to keep his mind closed. “No,” he said, without apparent interest, “only the same as ever.”

“Not exactly the same,” said the Other Copper. Copper could feel the reflection of his own restrained anger, and he turned his attention from Silver to meet his other self’s gaze. The effect was disconcerting. They were mirrors, and not mirrors, their minds entirely open to each other. Copper’s instinct to close the other out was useless when they were the same being. The only difference was in the loss he carried; the drastic action he had taken. That was what the Other Copper had meant.

The Other Copper’s anger was flattened further, but it was still there. _I cannot believe this is a good idea._

 _Sometimes_ , Copper replied, _there are no good ideas. This seemed the most likely to be effective._ Not that he really needed to explain that to himself.

“I see this is going to be tiresome,” said Silver, standing by the clock on the mantelpiece. Then he gave Copper a sharp look, before he moved along the wall, heading towards the desk and the papers it contained. “Why did you do it? Breaking bounds, Copper? Did something force you? If you need to go and shut yourself away in a darkened space to recover from the shock, we’ll understand.”

Copper stepped forward, putting himself between Silver and the desk, before he could repeat his earlier error. “Something went wrong. I believe I can fix it from here, but not from there.” He caught hold of Silver’s arm. “Stop. Don’t touch that document.”

Silver threw up his hands as the two Coppers exchanged another glance. “I’ll be elsewhere, then. Call me when you’ve bored yourselves to death. I shouldn’t imagine that will take long!”

“Yes,” said Copper. “Do that. It’s not only the newspaper, nor the other document – a lease – it’s the house. It was built on the site of the previous house and with some of the same materials, I believe.”

Silver straightened himself. “Ah,” he said, and disappeared. Copper tracked his presence in the house, aware of him on the landing above, and then walking down the stairs. He was still here; not gone.

Copper looked down at the desk, not caring to see the expression on his own face. There was no hiding from himself. He did not need to ask if the Other Copper had seen his brief flare of alarm at Silver vanishing again. He felt the Other Copper circle around him slowly, examining him, confirming what he had read in him.

 _Which of us is from the original timeline?_ the Other Copper asked.

_You._ Copper clenched his gloved fist, as he untied the ribbon for the second time. _At least, it’s irrelevant now. We can end this from here now I’ve stopped you two making the same error. Silver was sent for a reason and we won’t complete this without him._

The lease was also identical, Copper found, reading it again to be certain. 

“We’ve seen ghosts,” said the Other Copper. “The inhabitants. In the old house, then, presumably. Yes, that makes sense.”

Copper pulled off his left glove and traced his hand along the ink of the lease. “In the old house, yes. Where they were happy. In the new one –” He hesitated as the ink evaporated off the paper, dark blue motes winding a burning path around his fingers. Somebody else’s pain and grief bit into him. “Four of them died. The well, I think. They dug a new one once they built the new house, and it was not in the right place. There was contamination. Death.”

“And a printer’s error triggered off an event that was waiting to happen here,” said the Other Copper. “Aren’t observers supposed to prevent this kind of thing?”

Copper blinked, still staring down at the paper. “There are too many potential breaks. Every inch of the earth has history. We know that. It isn’t our area, but we know that.”

“The well, the reused stones, the picture, the papers –”

“I’ll take care of the papers,” said Copper. “And the drawing.”

The Other Copper nodded and moved to the door. “Silver is seeing to the remnants of the old house. I’ll take the former well.”

They stared at each other, and Copper found his other self a blank to him suddenly. He was glad to see him go, heading outside to the well. They’d filled it in, but the Other Copper would find it; he’d seen it earlier, so they both had. The clarity of the image in his mind broke up, however, with the departure of his other self and he realized that the Other Copper had been supplying memories for both of them where they were identical; he was losing his own.

He frowned, pressing a gloved hand to his temple, his head aching. He couldn’t remember clearly, save only the pain and the loss. He was probably not stable any more. Crossing the timelines would do that to someone.

He must wait no longer to destroy the trigger, before he lost who he was and what his purpose was. He held a hand over the newspaper; the letters dancing until the line about the premises being vacant had been replaced by printer’s decorations. The sketch similarly washed away with one light stroke of his fingers, charcoal becoming dust, and then he turned back to the lease.

He removed his other glove and held both hands over the document, drawing the ink into himself – taking the trigger away with him into the other timeline that now could not and would not ever have existed. This would become the single and only timeline now.

He disintegrated, just as Silver had before him.

***

Silver walked back into the room to find a red-faced tenant farmer yelling at Copper, who was leaning against the chimney breast, and listening without much evident interest.

“Who the devil are you?” demanded the farmer, swinging round to face Silver. “How many of you are there?”

Silver widened his eyes. “Oh, we’re here about the tax – counting your hearths. I see Copper has found one. Well done, Copper.”

Copper shot him a glare. Silver suspected that his colleague was only hanging into the chimney breast like that because he might fall over otherwise.

“What?” said the farmer. “Hearths? They haven’t taxed hearths for years and I never heard they were starting again.”

Silver waved a hand. “Oh, how silly of me. My fault, Copper,” he said, talking past the farmer. “We should have been counting windows. Now if you, sir, will just run along, we shall do that and soon be out of your way.”

The farmer opened his mouth, presumably to object again, and at considerable volume, but Silver leant in nearer and put his hand on the man’s arm. “If you wouldn’t mind,” he murmured and then watched in amusement as the man wandered out, although he paused for one last confused look before he shut the door after him.

As soon as he had gone, Silver rounded on Copper, his expression hardening. “Which one _are_ you?”

“There is only me,” said Copper, shaking off whatever temporary weakness had affected him; if not the shadow of something Silver couldn’t quite read.

Silver drew back. “I suppose not, but still – you must have known what he meant to do. Being the same.” He touched Copper’s sleeve. “It’s not him, it’s you.”

“There’s no difference,” Copper said, snapping. He brushed Silver’s hand away.

Silver shrugged. “He came from a different point in time. That’s detectable, as you very well know.” He glanced around the room. It was still the same, although there was an account book on the table now, and a plate with part of a small loaf of bread left on it. It was inhabited again. “Fixed,” Silver murmured, “but what if this wasn’t the original timeline?”

“Irrelevant,” said Copper, with a sudden, brief smile that dispelled whatever after-effects had been lingering within him. “The alternative was unacceptable.”


End file.
